Progress on the Personal Web App
The application is really coming together and I figured it was time to write a post about all of the progress I've made over the past month or so. Check out http://www.jeffreyjhebert.com to see how it's shaping up.
The majority of the public content on the site is split into different categories, which include Work, Education, Climbing, Cycling, and Music, as well as a number of others that don't show up in the public navigation of the site. These category pages are where I'm aggregating all types of related content like projects, adventures, workouts, shopping lists, to-do lists, and even category-specific content like my degrees, courses, jobs, employers, albums, etc. Adding some of these specific content types was motivated by the desire to have this personal website also serve as a portfolio and linked-in profile on steroids. The category pages constitute the vast majority of the public content on the site. A few other goodies I've been working on are contact management (with links to both Address Book and Facebook), real-time personalized news aggregation, personalized weather forecasts, and some nifty charting and schedule viewing for my workouts. I've included a few screenshots to show what some of these private pages look like. The utility of having all of this data online and in the cloud is already becoming apparent to me--if I don't have my laptop or phone handy (or lose one), I can still reference almost anything I could need. Hosting all of the photos and videos currently costs me $0.07 per month with Amazon's S3. I could expand the amount of data being hosted dramatically and it would still be dirt cheap. The site hosting itself is on Heroku and is running with their completely free plan since the site will never receive high volumes of traffic. I have integrated both geo-location and the Google Maps API for almost anything with a location tied to it. This lets me show all of my adventures, photos, videos, and contacts on custom maps and has proved really interesting and fun to build as well as useful. I'm using the Weather Channel's XML API to grab forecasts in real time and display them on the appropriate days within my calendar. Going forward, I plan to spend more time syncing up my calendars, using the Google Calendar API. I also want to build a light version of Evernote within the site to be able to easily remember things and hash out ideas in a central place. I'd like to take my weather forecast and kick it up a notch to have a simple message at the top of the site if I need an umbrella on any given day. Check it out and let me know what you think. Any ideas for improvement or additional features that would be useful in your own website? Let me know!- jeff
